My 2018 Goals

Like most people I always try to set myself a New Year’s resolution. This year I am doing it slightly different in that?I have lots of smaller goals rather than one big one, and I have made them public by doing a blog about them. This will hopefully help me stick to them more than in previous years, and I can use this blog as a 12 month plan and to see how things are going.

Matt Cho, from Macro Lean, says in his video how to follow through on goals, we are more likely to stick to our goals if we share them publicly. This will hopefully add a little bit of good pressure to help me stay on track.

I have split my goals in to different areas of my life. If I just have one New Year’s resolution then I won’t feel I am pushing myself enough, and it will only be benefiting one aspect of my life. I want to feel like I am progressing in all areas but I don’t want to go overboard.

Here are my 2018 goals

Get rid of stuff I no longer need

This year I want to have a massive clear out in my home. I have far too much stuff, and I can really feel the ‘messy house, messy mind? concept more and more these days. I think it will do me the world of good to get rid of stuff I no longer need. It will also help make things easier when I move house next, and I may even make a bit of money if I sell some of my stuff too. Here is what I plan to do over the first 5 months of the year.

January and February – Garage (hopefully there will be less spiders in there this time of year)

March – Lounge and Office

April – Kitchen

May – Bedrooms

Make better use of my time after work

I often finish work and literally do nothing apart from make tea and watch TV. Sometimes this is good as it means I am relaxing, and this is an important part of my pain management. But when I add up all these hours over a week, a month and a year, it’s a heck of a lot of wasted time. I can make better use of this time and I aim to do this is 2018.

My goal is to simply not settle on the sofa for at least an hour after work. Obviously, if I was having a bad pain day I would have to be a little flexible with this. I will use this hour to:

Do cleaning chores and tidy the house

Walk my dogs

Use the time to action my number 1 goal above and get rid of stuff I don’t need

Work on my blog

Health and fitness goals

I’ve never been very good at sticking to these goals. I generally make them too broad and this usually means they are unachievable. This year I have a smaller number of specific goals which will hopefully be easier to stick to:

Go to the gym twice a week (this can include a mixture of classes, swimming and cardio)

Do my physio exercises 3 times a day

Aim for 70,000 steps each week (this takes the pressure off doing 10,000 steps a day on my bad pain days)

Food and drink goals

Like with my health and fitness goals, I’ve never been good at sticking to these, I love food and beer too much, and I have a very sweet tooth. I would like to lose a about a stone in weight, but I certainly won’t be restricting myself on what I can and can’t eat as this doesn’t work for me. I will be changing my approach to eating and making better food and drink choices instead. This is what I plan to do:

Eat 3 pieces of fruit or veg a day before I start eating my treats (this means I get the good stuff in first)

Drink 2 SHO bottles (I got the sports bottle for Christmas) of water a day (this will hopefully fill me up so I eat less)

Eat within a calorie deficit (meaning I will hopefully lose a little weight)

It’s not realistic to think that I will stick to these 100% of the time. But if I do this 80-90% of the time then this is good enough.

Blogging goals

I don’t want to be too ambitious with these goals, as I am purposely not putting any pressure on self with my blogging. When I do I don’t enjoy it. At the moment I am loving writing my posts; connecting with other people with chronic pain; and learning from those with more blogging experience than me. Blogging is also helping me too – read my previous blog post 5 ways blogging is helping me.

My main goals for 2018 are to increase the traffic to my blog. And I hope to do this by:

Get back to writing at least 2 posts a week

Guest post for another pain/disability/health blogger

Sign up to chronic pain blogging communities

Learn as much as I can, as often as I can (progression, not perfection)

Other goals

These are a few other goals that don’t really fit into the above categories:

Try cooking some new recipes

Take my dogs on different walks (we are all getting bored of the routes we currently do)

Try and reduce my anxiety – I’m not sure how yet but I definitely need to work on this

Hello

I’m Alice, I’m here to help you cope with and understand chronic pain. I share my experiences, tips and advice to help you carry on doing the things you enjoy and teach your friends and family to understand more so they can support you.